Donna Brazile, attempting to praise Hillary, commits a Kinsley-esque gaffe that inadvertently winds up describing two centuries of artistic “progress” instead:
It’s low-key and voter-focused — solid, but not exciting. And according to Democrats close to Clinton and her team, that was more or less the point for phase one. Excitement can wait, they said in interviews last week, so long as she proves — as her campaign aides have repeated again and again — that this time, she is taking “nothing for granted.”
“There’s a rhythm. She’s starting off like Beethoven, with melodies and chords that people understand. But she’s got to end up like Beyoncé,” said Donna Brazile, the Democratic strategist who worked on both of Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns.
As Andrew Stiles asks at the Washington Free Beacon, “What does this even mean?”
Beethoven is the boring simpleton that everyone can relate to, and Beyoncé’s expertly packaged quadruple-bylined pop hits are the sophisticated catalog of musical elites? And that’s a good thing? Who knows? A much better analogy for Hillary’s efforts to interact with everyday Americans and prove she’s one of them would be Beethoven performing in front of a stadium full of Beyoncé fans, or perhaps Hillary herself trying to learn to choreography to “Crazy in Love.”
Beyond the backwards “progress” of commercial music from Beethoven to Beyoncé, there’s the candidate herself. In 2007 and 2008, Obama was comparatively young, fresh, new, and undefined, a self-described “blank screen,” an “exotic who says nothing” as one Democrat operative with a byline wrote to bolster the kickoff of his presidential run. The rock star comparisons could work and helped to explain away his domestic political inexperience, and as we now know, his unpreparedness to be a world leader. In sharp contrast, comparing Hillary to an energetic 33-year old musician-dancer is, well, quite a stretch, unless top scientists can make remarkable progress with titanium exoskeleton systems in the next six months.
But in any case, is the typical rock star, having guzzled a half-gallon of scotch or cognac and a multitude of white powdery substances really who you want in charge of the federal government, let alone answering the phone at 3:00 in the morning? (And we all know how well Hillary actually did during that moment.)
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